New domain name?
Need to change a file name?
Hierarchy of your servers directory structure change?

meta http-equiv="refresh"… is highly frowned on by search engines and is commonly used by spammers. As such, THIS SHOULD BE AVOIDED.

A 301 Redirect as it is commonly referred to will allow you to make these changes without compromising your hard earned SEO results.

Using the Apache web server, fortunately this is a simply task.

There are a few different places you can set various 'Redirect' directives such as your servers main configuration file (typically httpd.conf) or within a 'Virtual Host' container inside one of your server configuration files. The final method and the one we will be discussing here is using your servers directory Auth file (AKA: .htaccess).

The first thing you do is create a file named .htaccess

There are a couple different way to approach this but in it most simple form you can just issue a 'Redirect' request in your .htaccess file like so:

Redirect /foo http://foobar.com/foo

In this example if the client requests
http://myserver.com/foo/foobar.txt,

it will be told to access
http://foobar.com/foo/foobar.txt instead.

Now this is not quite complete yet, since we need to specifically send a 301 status code. Without the status argument "Redirect" will send a temporary redirect status (302). So we simply take the above example and change it to:

Redirect 301 /foo http://foobar.com/foo

OR

Redirect permanent /foo http://foobar.com/foo

And there is also a specific 'RedirectPermanent' directive as well so you could just as easily say:

RedirectPermanent /foo http://foobar.com/foo

So far so good? Excellent. So now you ask what if I want to change ALL my .htm files to .html. Introducing 'RedirectMatch' which makes use of standard regular expression syntax.

RedirectMatch (.*)\.htm$ http://myserver.com$1.html

Going into an in depth explanation of regular expression if beyond the scope of this tutorial but a quick Google search for "Perl compatible regular expression syntax" should set you on your way.

What the above example does is match any character '.' any number of times '*', i.e., that is it will match everything. (.*) the parenthesis group the result into a variable which we will use with a back-reference ($1) later in the directive. Next, '\' simply escapes the following '.'. Since '.' has special meaning in regular expression syntax we need to escape it if we want to use it in the literal sense, '\' provides the escape sequence. Next is the '.htm' which we know is a static part of the search string we're looking for followed by '$' which simply marks the end of the pattern in a regular expression (regex). So the above example takes any file with an .htm extension and redirects the client to the same file at the location specified, i.e., http://myserver.com$1.html

But wait, what's that '$1'? Well remember we said we were going to store a variable for use in a back reference later, well here it is. The '$1' simply says that whatever was in (.*) is now represented by $1

So, the client request for example foobar.htm, the above directive matches this and redirects the client to http://myserver.com/foobar.html because 'foobar' is stored in '$1'. Just as with 'Redirect', 'RedirectMatch' takes a status argument so to issue a 301 (permanent) redirect we do this:

RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.htm$ http://myserver.com$1.html

Another method we can use is via mod_rewrite. This requires that the mod_rewrite module is active on your webserver. It usually is and is done by the system administrators when they installed the webserver. mod_rewrite is a very powerful URL re-writing engine and we will only by scratching a hair on its head here.

Again, in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine ON
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mynewdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The above example will re-map your old domain to a new one and issue a 301 status code (permanent redirect). So a request for

http://olddomain.com/foobar.html will go to

http://mynewdomain.com/foobar.html

If you simply want to redirect all requests regardless of the page requested to the new domain you could use:

RewriteRule /.* http://mynewdomain.com/ [R=301,L]

In this case no matter what file or directory is requested they will all go to

http://mynewdomain.com/ i.e., http://myolddomain.com/foobar.html

will go to http://mynewdomain.com/

The [R=301,L] means redirect the client and send a 301 status code (R=301) and make this the last rule (L).

Whichever method you decide on, once completed upload the resulting file to your

If you are planning to move your website to different domain without hurting your website performance in major search engine results especially GOOGLE?

The first objective that you need to do is to switch unseen and visible to the user and to make sure that major search engine specially Google that your new created pages must get the same quality signals as the pages on your own website. Every time you move your website to different domain, darned 404 File Not Found can hurt the user experience and negatively force your site's performance in major search engine specially Google search results.

Let's take an example moving your domain to another one. (www.seodubai.com to www.seodubai.org ) and this is different when you moving your IP's. 

• Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

• Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google's search results. When you're satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don't do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it's not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won't be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

• If you're changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.

• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn't practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don't have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like …/recipes/chocolatecake.html).

• To prevent confusion, it's best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.

• Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn't showing unwanted 404 errors.

We'll admit it, moving is never easy – but these steps should help ensure that none of your good web reputation falls off the truck in the process.